1. Field of the Invention
The subject of the present invention relates to providing IT services to customers in general, and in particular how to dynamically and automatically set up offerings for IT services in order to optimize the rate of utilization of the service provider's existing resource infrastructure.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the traditional outsourcing business, customers who want to concentrate on their core business hand over their information technology (IT) business or at least parts of it to service providers who run the IT businesses of multiple customers. For each IT business the service provider has to define a service environment. The term “service environment” as used in the present patent defines all resources needed for a certain IT service to be provided to a customer, how to manage those resources in order to fulfill the conditions of the IT service, how to handle situations like resource shortages or resource overprovisioning, and the appropriate assigned resource management actions like configuring or installing of the resources. Each IT component within the service environment represents a so-called resource. For example a resource may be hardware (e.g. a server), software (e.g. application programs), a network with certain channel capabilities, disks, etc. In normal situations a lot of resources within the existing resource infrastructure are not used, however they cannot be provided to other customers.
In order to achieve a greater rate of utilization of the service provider's infrastructure it would be advantageous to create additional offerings in advance by identifying and using all free resources of the service provider's infrastructure independently of whether they are already assigned to a service environment.
The present application describes a method and system which dynamically sets up offerings for IT service by the service provider in order to optimize the rate of utilization of the service provider's existing resource infrastructure.
Offering an IT service encompasses the provisioning of that IT service on certain business conditions for either a mid-term or a long-term range. Normally, an IT service will be specifically created and offered for a specific customer based on an IT service agreement.
Based on that offering, the service provider has to build up the required service environment (SE) to fulfill the offered IT services.
In the state-of-the-art systems, the mapping of the offered IT service to the required service environment is either a static lookup of the corresponding resource management actions or a manual time-consuming creation of them. The first method is applicable for static environments, i.e. each provided IT service gets exactly the same SE. In case of parameterized offerings, the corresponding resource management actions have to be defined and/or adopted manually, which is a complex and therefore error-prone process. Typically the resource management actions are described by documentation, if at all, which lists the operator's tasks to be done in order to create and operate the customer's service environment. Some steps of automation have already been achieved using installation and configuration programs and/or scripts. However, that type of automation still requires some kind of manual processing, at least the selection and parameterization of these programs, and their execution at the requested point in time. Autonomous resource control systems require all kinds of resource management actions in a machine-readable form with defined syntax and semantics. The system creates and operates the SE according to defined rules and activities. The whole process of creation, operation and deletion of the SE must be supported by providing appropriate machine-readable task lists, rules for the dynamic allocation and deallocation of resources, and the SE-specific inter-component messaging (events and subscriptions).
The prior art offering creation process normally starts with the creation of an IT service offering. Then, a respective required service environment has to be built and assigned to that IT service.
A disadvantage of such a procedure is that all resources of the service provider's resource infrastructure which have been already assigned to respective service environments are normally excluded from the creation of a new offering independently of whether those resources have free time slots.
Starting from this, an object of the present invention is to avoid the disadvantage of the prior art and to improve the utilization of the service provider's infrastructure.